Elves have always been a staple of fantasy. It seems that elves are so popular that there has always been the need for multiple races of them. They have been the high intelligent race that seems to be on the way out a lot of time and guiding the younger races to their own prime. Obviously, that is a heavy influence for books like Lord of the Rings. So, it really doe not surprise me to see a book titled Elfclash.
Elfclash is a pdf by Khan?s Press. They have a couple of other titles out that I have not seen. Elfclash is a player?s guide. It references a DM?s guide but that does not seem to be out yet. It is two hundred and twenty two pages in length. The zip files is a bit under five megs and the pdf is a bit over five megs. It is nicely book marked. But the only version they have is in full color with borders on the top and bottom and some of the pages have background. So while that makes it look good on the screen it is not a good pdf to print out.
The art in the book is not good. I found my self cringing at the art. I am not an art person and I rarely do comment on it. I found the people to be ill proportioned and they just did not look good. On the flip side the book has a good layout. There are pages made up to be written text on parchment and this are easy to read and recognize for what they are.
Elfclash is a few things all in one. It covers a new setting, has new races, classes, skills, feats, and magic system. This is a world that focuses on the elves. There is one dominant race of them, and they are hunted races of them. Overall the setting gave me a feeling of Midnight, but not really in a good way. It has the same feelings of the one mostly dominate race and the other races either just getting along or trying to rebel. It is not as hopeless as Midnight can seem. Another thing that really clinched these two settings being similar are the races and classes are a bit more powerful then standard D&D ones. In Midnight they did this well but Elf clash?s classes and races really do not seem balanced with each other.
One thing they did that I am not a fan of is add skills that help in combat. These are not like tumble which helps movement in combat, these are like Archery which actually gives one even greater bonuses when welding a weapon. This gives a +1 bonus per 4 ranks unless one happens to be of the Arcane class. They get +1 bonus per skill rank. The archery skill also does not list DCs for anything. So, I?m left with wondering what use as a skill this actually has. There are a few skills like this.
They have some interesting feats. There are some that are better if one is a certain class. For instance there is a feat called Charismatic. This allows a player to choose two skills based on charisma to get a +2 bonus. Bards and Paladins though get to pick four skills to get the +2 bonus. Cross class skills also become class skills, but I?m not sure if that applies to everyone who takes the feat or just the Bard and Paladin. They do have some interesting feats like Lightning Reaction that allows one to roll three d20 instead of one for initiative. It has three feats as a prerequisite. There are a lot of creative feats here and the writers were not afraid to take chances.
The setting is well written and an enjoyment to read. However, the rules mechanics seem to be a problem that will not be easy to fix. There are references here to the DM?s Guide of Elfclash so I am uncertain how some of the things work exactly. There are numerous new types of equipment as well.
Elfclash has a lot to offer but it also has its fair share of problems. I think they have a good start to something with this but there are more then a few areas that I think will give DMs problems especially those that care about balance.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Disappointing<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>
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